DON'T MIND DYING: A Novel of Country Lust and Urban Decay

by Steven Chapple ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4, 1979

A tiresomely heavy--handed and cartoony-vulgar serving of message farce--as happily married, 77-year-old Codger Bill Lewis of Montana hitches his way to 1980s San Francisco to shake up his bourgeois teamster-leader son and put some old-fashioned spirit back into a labor movement that has sold out to the Bosses. Along the route Codger does battle with a few masturbating Establishment villains and also picks up a sidekick: young Betty Sue Finkelstein (""Finkelstein! . . . Excuse me, ma'am, but you must be part of the gang that murdered Our Lord""), who listens to Codger's tales of early Labor heroes and provides other services as well. (""Betty Sue ringed Codger's wrinkled old-man's cock with her thumb and forefinger. . . . His callused thumb rolled her sweet clitoris like a marble in oil. . . ."") And when they get to S.F. Codger finds that his son isn't supporting a wildcat strike at G.M. and that the (primarily black) garbage workers have been done dirty by their leaders--so he forms a joint strike group, stirs up a fracas, enlists the aid of Muhammad Ali, teaches his grand-kids to talk to animals, avoids the evil machinations of California Gov. Jerry Green (the ""new Zen-poi in a brown eco wrapper with the same old money money money pulling the hamstrings""), but ultimately winds up a victim of the Capitalists. This is the sort of comic-strip tract--mixing rhetoric and sentimentality and gross digressions--that you'd have thought passed with the Sixties. Not so--alas, alas.

Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories: FICTION